2 pp. / Recommendations for diet, foods and activity to reduce risk for developing some cancers.

Collaboration and sharing of information are the basis of modern social web system. Users in the social web systems are establishing and joining online communities, in order to collectively share their content with a group of people having common topic of interest. Group or community activities have increased exponentially in modern social Web systems. With the explosive growth of social communities, users of social Web systems have experienced considerable difficulty with discovering communities relevant to their interests. In this study, we address the problem of recommending communities to individual users. Recommender techniques that are based solely on community affiliation, may fail to find a wide range of proper communities for users when their available data are insufficient. We regard this problem as tag-based personalized searches. Based on social tags used by members of communities, we first represent communities in a low-dimensional space, the so-called latent semantic space, by using Latent Semantic Analysis. Then, for recommending communities to a given user, we capture how each community is relevant to both user’s personal tag usage and other community members’ tagging patterns in the latent space. We specially focus on the challenging problem of recommending communities to users who have joined very few communities or having no prior community membership. Our evaluation on two heterogeneous datasets shows that our approach can significantly improve the recommendation quality.

Thesis advisor: Donald Fishman / The whistleblower has emerged as a relevant player in today's shifting economic and corporate landscape. Using a critical-historical methodology, this thesis explores the dimensions and boundaries of the concept of the “whistleblower”. The specific case studies of WorldCom, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and WikiLeaks are examined. The analysis includes an investigation into the shifting role of the whistleblower in society and whether legislative enactments have been able to support society’s need to protect current and future whistleblowers. Finally, this thesis examines the whistleblower's implications for a more ethical future. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication.

Sammanfattning Bakgrund I dagens moderna samhälle blir barn och ungdomar allt mer stillasittande och fysiskt inaktiva än tidigare. Enligt studier uppnår så få som 15 % av svenska 15-åringar världshälsoorganisationens (WHO) rekommendationer för fysisk aktivitet. Fysisk inaktivitet ökar risken för flertalet sjukdomstillstånd. Mycket forskning finns angående aktivitetsnivån bland ungdomar men bristfällig data kring hur ungdomar upplever fysisk aktivitet.   Syfte Denna studie syftar till att utforska hur gymnasieelever som inte uppnår WHO:s rekommendationer för fysisk aktivitet upplever att vara fysiskt aktiva samt hur de upplever gällande rekommendationer.   Design och metod En kvalitativ intervjustudie med semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes på sex stycken gymnasieelever, varav tre var kvinnor och tre var män. Den slutgiltiga undersökningsgruppen bestod av fem personer. En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av datamaterialet gjordes.   Resultat och konklusion Av studien framkom att motivation och uppskattad aktivitet upplevdes som förutsättningar för att fysisk aktivitet genomfördes. Den aktivitet som utfördes var ofta i samband med skola eller tillsammans med vänner. Skolrelaterad stress uppgavs som den främsta anledningen till utebliven fysisk aktivitet. Studiens resultat visade att deltagarna upplevde fysisk aktivitet som något positivt samtidigt som de inte rör sig i enlighet med WHO:s rekommendationer. Denna ambivalens upplever författarna som intressant och mer forskning borde göras på ämnet. / Abstract   Background In today’s society, children and adolescents are less physical active than previous generations. Studies show, as few as 15% of Swedish 15-year olds obtain the amount of daily physical activity as recommended by The world health organization (WHO). Physical inactivity is a contributing factor to many different diagnoses. Research has been done about levels of physical activity among adolescents, although hardly any studies on the experience of being physically active.   Aim/method The aim of this study is to investigate the experience of being physical active among 16 - 17 year olds who do not obtain the recommendations of WHO and their view on the recommendations. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted for this qualitative interview study. The data was analyzed using a qualitative content analysis.   Results/conclusion This study shows that motivation and appreciated activity is of great importance for being physically active. Physical activity performed by the selection group were mainly school related. School related stress was the main reason for physical activity not being performed. The results shows that the participants have a positive attitude towards physical activity still they are not achieving the recommendations from WHO. The authors believe this ambivalence should be studied further.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the interaction between cardiovascular risk factors (particularly novel inflammatory measures) and short-term changes in physical activity. This is important as it is necessary to establish whether the changes that occur to these markers over the longer-term might be a consequence of short-term changes in physical activity. Chapter 4 investigated the challenges in handling the large volume of minute-by-minute data obtained from the use of a novel device for estimating physical activity energy expenditure from synchronous heart rate and accelerometer data. This chapter describes the development of specific software to enable efficient data-processing and evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of this new method of physical activity measurement. Chapter 5 sought to understand the reproducibility of various measures that were central to progress in this field in order to justify their inclusion in future intervention-based studies. This work showed that the inflammatory markers C-Reactive Protein and interleukin-6 and the lipid markers total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein and triglycerides were all reproducible measures. The measurement of physical activity energy expenditure, when demarked into common categories, was also mostly reproducible. The circulating marker oxidised-low-density lipoprotein, an in-house adhesion assay and in-house mononuclear cell cytokine secretion assay were determined to be not reproducible and were not used further in this thesis. In Chapter 6 a group of highly active middle-aged men undertook one week of detraining where all structured exercise was removed but activities of daily living were allowed. It was shown that this short-term period of detraining did not elicit any changes in any of the inflammatory, lipid or glucose/insulin markers measured including a commercial, externally-validated whole-blood cytokine secretion assay. In Chapter 7 a sedentary group of middle-aged men performed daily brisk walking for 30 minutes over one week. This period of training did not elicit any change in any of the inflammatory, lipid or glucose/insulin markers measured; including no changes in glucose measures with an oral glucose tolerance test either one day after the last training session or three days later. The differences between the highly-active (Chapter 6) and sedentary (Chapter 7) participants in inflammatory markers were large with substantially higher concentrations for C-Reactive Protein and interleukin-6 in the sedentary middle-aged men. Because these do not change in response to relatively short-term detraining (Chapter 6) or training (Chapter 7) it appears that these differences represent long-term changes and adaptations. Therefore, in addition to being reproducible, fasting inflammatory and lipid markers are very stable with no changes after positive or negative short-term alterations in physical activity level. One immediate implication of this stability is improved ease of follow-up measures after interventions (e.g., training studies) since differences appear to reflect chronic changes in response to the regular training/detraining undertaken and not to recent exercise per se. In the future it will be important to establish better demarcations of acceptable physical activity behaviour. It will also be important to establish whether recently-trained individuals also exhibit stability in their inflammatory markers after a short-period of detraining and whether sedentary individuals are ever capable of achieving the blood profiles of their highly-active counterparts.

There is a dearth of studies investigating methods by which parental compliance may be enhanced. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relative efficacy of four conditions--high information, prompting, incentive , and comparison control--in increasing parental compliance. The self-help recommendation was to obtain a book or video from a local library. Parents were from a small, rural, northern Utah community; their children were diagnosed with externalizing behavior problems. Chi-square analyses were utilized to assess statistically significant differences, and effect sizes were computed to assess magnitude of association. The incentive intervention influenced parental compliance to a greater degree than either the comparison control or other intervention conditions. A secondary purpose of the study was to investigate the association of certain sociodemographic variables with parental compliance. Results of a logistic regression were indicative of no contribution of sociodemographic variables to the prediction of parental compliance. The relationship of current results with previous studies is discussed, as well as implications for clinical practice and future research.

<p>The aim of this paper is to see if Sweden has implemented the recommendations and taken notice of the guidelines for employment that the Commission and Council set up every year and from this see the role of the Commission and Council for the national employment politics. The years that I focused on in the paper are year 2000- 2004. The method that is used is a case study research that is exploratory and explanatory. The theoretical starting points are theories about delegation, cooperation and a variation of control and autonomy. This is recognized in the Principal- Agent theory and the Principal- Supervisor-Agent model. The Council and the Commission give recommendations and guidelines every year to the member states that points out what should be done for the employment. The member states can choose to implement the recommendations and guidelines or not. In other words is it not mandatory. The result of the paper is that Sweden has implemented and taken notice of to the recommendations and guidelines that the Council and the Commission gave to Sweden during year 2000- 2004, yet I argue that there have been differences to which extend the implementation has taken place.</p>

Collaboration and sharing of information are the basis of modern social web system. Users in the social web systems are establishing and joining online communities, in order to collectively share their content with a group of people having common topic of interest. Group or community activities have increased exponentially in modern social Web systems. With the explosive growth of social communities, users of social Web systems have experienced considerable difficulty with discovering communities relevant to their interests. In this study, we address the problem of recommending communities to individual users. Recommender techniques that are based solely on community affiliation, may fail to find a wide range of proper communities for users when their available data are insufficient. We regard this problem as tag-based personalized searches. Based on social tags used by members of communities, we first represent communities in a low-dimensional space, the so-called latent semantic space, by using Latent Semantic Analysis. Then, for recommending communities to a given user, we capture how each community is relevant to both user’s personal tag usage and other community members’ tagging patterns in the latent space. We specially focus on the challenging problem of recommending communities to users who have joined very few communities or having no prior community membership. Our evaluation on two heterogeneous datasets shows that our approach can significantly improve the recommendation quality.

Denna uppsats syfte var att ta reda på vilken kännedom som finns om de svenska näringsrekommendationerna hos människor på ett antal svenska arbetsplatser. Syftet har även inne-fattat att ta reda på huruvida man använder sig av denna kännedom eller inte. Metod: En kvantitativ ansats i en tvärsnittsstudie har använts i denna undersökning och hundratio enkäter har blivit besvarade. Dessa enkäter har analyserats både kvantitativt och kvalitativt. Resultatet visade att majoriteten av respondenterna inte kände till de svenska näringsrekom-mendationerna. Majoriteten var också omedvetna om hur den procentuella energifördelningen såg ut. Jämförbart med tidigare studier så underskattade männen rekommendationerna för grönsaker medan kvinnorna hade mer kännedom om rekommendationerna som helhet. Båda könen överskattade rekommendationerna för protein och underskattade rekommendationerna för kolhydrater. Slutsats: Av de få respondenter som kände till de svenska näringsrekommen-dationerna, använde de sig inte av dessa i sin vardag. Det är därför viktigt att hitta nya sätt att kommunicera denna information, ett förslag kan vara via sociala medier. Denna information bör vara anpassad så att alla personer har en möjlighet att förstå den. / The aim of the study was to find out what information people have regarding the Swedish Nutrient Recommendations at some Swedish workplaces. The aim also included to find out how people use - or do not use - this information in their everyday lives. Method: A cross sectional study design was used and a survey was administered at various workplaces where hundred and ten questionnaires were answered. These surveys have been analyzed quantita-tively and qualitatively. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were not aware of the Swedish Nutrient Recommendations, including the percentage of the energy dis-tribution. Consistent with previous studies, men underestimated the recommendations for vegetables, while women had slightly more knowledge about the recommendations as a whole. Both sexes overestimated the recommendations regarding protein and underestimated the recommendations for carbohydrates. Conclusion: Out of the few respondents who were aware of the recommendations, most did not make use of them in their everyday life. In order to improve public health, it is important that through better or new ways of communication get more information about the nutrient recommendations.

Abstract   Purpose The purpose of this thesis is; “To find out whether a strategy based on accumulated stock recommendations are able to outperform mutual funds and/or index funds with similar holdings over time”. Background During the past 30 years the interest for the financial market has been ever increasing. With the increased interest for the financial market, also an increased interest for the different investment alternatives have developed, thus also the amount of various financial products. Further there has been a discussion whether the different investment products actually add value to the investors. Method To be able to reach our purpose we have constructed a portfolio containing stocks based on recommendations. We have also come up with a method in order to decide the weights of the individual stocks in our portfolio. Further, we have used existing theories in order to estimate the return and the standard deviation. We have also benchmarked our portfolio against popular funds on the market. Conclusion We have seen that our portfolio during the six years running have performed better than the existing funds and also resulted in a lower standard deviation i.e. risk. Thus the results are applicable on our specific data, more research is needed in order to make any statements of statistical significance.